Final Report

1. Title of project
Personal Learning Environments and Personal Development Planning

2. Project director/s
Alan Cann1, Jon Scott1, Jo Badge1, Richard Mobbs2, Steve Rooney3

3. Department(s)/Unit(s)
School of Biological Sciences, 2IT Services, 3Student Support and Development Service
1

4. Keywords
Personal learning environments, virtual learning environments, personal development planning,
ePortfolios

5. Abstract

The aim of this project was to develop an institutional exemplar of a personal and
shared virtual space for students' learning, research and networking using Web 2.0
technologies independent of any institutional services. This will provide users with the
skills to maintain such environments as the major component of their personal
development planning (PDP) and as part of a lifelong learning agenda. The space was
built around a range of freely available Web 2.0 tools and services, complemented by
the Blackboard Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and other student support
information repositories.

6. Pedagogic Background to the Project

University of Leicester students are transients within our system, usually staying for
three or four years full-time study, possibly longer if they are studying part-time or
move on to post-graduate training. What they learn is relevant to their lifelong
learning skills and future career progression and, as such, students will benefit from
having continued access to a virtual study network based on their undergraduate and
career experience. Resources for their formal learning not only originate from their
university teachers but also from informal virtual sources of various kinds (e.g.,
comments by members of the public on a fieldwork photo uploaded onto a photo-
sharing site such as Flickr, information from the student union, etc). Integrating formal
and informal sources into a symbiotic whole to benefit the students is a worthwhile
objective in its own right.

At present, the School of Biological Sciences implements PDP as a paper-based

exercise, supported by the personal tutor system, which students are encouraged but
not compelled to take part in. This exercise terminates when, or frequently before,
students graduate, so there is no guaranteed benefit in terms of lifelong learning. To
complement this application, we submitted an application for funding to the HEA
Subject Centre for Biosciences to introduce all first year Biological Sciences students
to the concept of a PLE at the very start of their university career. Their progress and
engagement was monitored and encouraged by regular summative assessment of
individual e-portfolios. In the pilot project, we will use the personal tutor system to
assess what proportion of second and third year students continue to maintain their e-
portfolio to document the development of their PLE as part of the School PDP
programme without the lever of formal assessment. This information will be used in
subsequent years to decide strategies to roll out the programme to all students
throughout their degrees. This NTI project complemented an external grant award
which was made and sought to use the experience within the School of Biological
Sciences could be used as a model to roll out similar approaches across the whole
University.
The concept of Web 2.0 has been attributed to Tim O'Reilly's conference contribution
in September 2005 [www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228]. It is usually accepted within the
Web 2.0 framework that there is an increased emphasis on the sharing of online
content, which is epitomised in social networking software such as blogs, Facebook
[leicesteruk.facebook.com] and MySpace [www.myspace.com], and constructive
collaboration tools such as wikis, discussion boards and online office tools, such as
Google Docs [docs.google.com].

A natural extension of the success of the web has been the need to go beyond the
reliance of a simple search engine to find relevant web content. Although web page
construction allows for metadata tagging, this facility has received very little support
from users, who find the library approach to content description too cumbersome.
Popular search tools have concentrated on web page content, mark-up and popularity
to rank-order information. The user solution has been to use a natural language
approach to content tagging, called social bookmaking, which allows users to define
their own tags to describe web content and bookmark them on web sites such as
delicious [http://delicious/].

There is a proliferation of sites offering a variety of services and the need to keep
logging-on to such sites to pick-up new and changed content has been alleviated with
the introduction of syndication (RSS, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS). This enables a web
feed to be sent to a suitable site which can aggregate several feeds keeping the user
informed about activities on these sites from single web page. Aggregating sites can
take feeds a wide variety of web sites including emails and news feeds and as such
offer act as an initial web starting point or portal site. Leading suppliers of such sites
include Netvibes [www.netvibes.com] and iGoogle [www.google.co.uk/ig].

Web 2.0 technology suppliers require authentication. This proliferation of sites

requiring log-in credentials and no emerging standards in this area of usernames
(names or email addresses) means that there is a need for an aggregating service
which hosts account details. Until the availability of cross-platform authentication
services such as OpenID or Shibboleth becomes universal, online password managers
such as Clipperz [www.clipperz.com] offer a service which under some circumstances
will allow automatic logging-in to Web 2.0 sites with an exchange of these credentials.

Although Marc Prensky has identified the large number of HE students that have
grown-up immersed in technology as digital natives (Prensky, M. 2001. Digital natives,
digital immigrants part 1. On the Horizon, 9, 5), we recognised that there are still
many students who remain naive about the use of Web 2.0 technologies (Edgeless
University: why higher education must embrace technology. JISC, June 2009
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/edge09). These students are not always aware of the pitfalls
of over exposure of personal data on social spaces. This project addressed these issues
through training and documentation. The project also recognises the digital divide that
often separates the digitally aware student from their tutors and also the growing
requirement that HE intuitions must address how the behaviour and use of external
services by students impact upon the governance of Universities. The former was
addressed by extending and continuing our staff development programme which has
begun to address many of these issues. The latter was addressed through the structure
that is currently responsible for the production of the University Internet Code of
Practice which currently only covers academic and research staff publishing on the
University web server.

The project aimed to integrate into one system and one virtual space these key items:

1. A user name and password management system, essential to control access to a

wide variety of Web 2.0 source sites.
2. RSS feeds and automatic content aggregators that enables students to capture and
organise within a single aggregating space a variety of digital information relevant to
their courses.
 3. A personal learning, research and networking space in which students can engage in
formal learning, communicate with tutors, peers, friendship groups and the wider
community, continue their personal and professional development programme, and
enrich course material (through material that they research and generate).
4. Web 2.0 tools for social networking and bookmarking, for authoring, editing and
presenting, and for picture and video sharing. Students are becoming familiar with
many of these through online social networking sites largely outside formal education.
5. Opportunities for collaborating in wikis and reflecting in blogs.

The project goes beyond the use of personal learning spaces as already explored in the
CETIS project [wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Ple], by enabling students to use concurrently and with
substantial synergy the Blackboard VLE and their personal PLE. Moreover, unlike the
Blackboard system, students will be able to take their PLE with them after graduating, for
further enhancement during continuing lifelong learning. The PLE architecture we
developed is flexible enough to cater for campus-based students and for distance learners
who cannot benefit from campus-limited information and learning technology
applications.

7. Specific Environment for the Project

The evaluation phase of the project was completed on schedule by May 2008. This was
followed up during the 2008/9 Session by a roll-out in the first year Biological Sciences
degree programmes for all students (~200).

8. Details of the work undertaken

The initial phase of the project completed in May 2008, trialed a wide range of Web 2.0
services. The results of this analysis can be viewed online at http://pleuol.wetpaint.com.
This resulted in the selection of the following key services for delivery on the first year
key skills module in 2008/09:

1. Google reader (RSS)

2. delicious (social bookmarking)
3. Google Documents (word processing, presentations & posters)
4. Flickr
5. Wordpress.com/Wetpaint/Wikispaces (ePortfolios)

The PLE content was delivered over two 10 week periods in the context of first year key
skills modules (BS1010 and BS1011). The choice of tools was based on our prior evaluation
project but was limited to some extent by the timetabled slots for these modules.
Selection was based on what was felt to be most useful and sustainable for this cohort,
e.g. most relevant to degree study, freely available, not likely to disappear. To be
effective, staff need to be online with students and "live" the experience. ”Authentic
assessment" in which marks are awarded for tasks which students perceive to be clearly
linked to their course of study rather than designed to familiarize themselves with the
technologies is also important for assessment.

The academic staff involved in delivering these modules also developed new marking
methods by collaborating in realtime using a mixture of Google spreadsheets and Twitter
(public and private comments) to mark and moderate student submissions.

It is difficult to accurately assess ongoing use of some of the services in the PLEs due to
privacy problems. To counteract this and to provide a focal point, at the end of the
module we asked students to draw mind-maps of the components they felt made up their
PLEs. This complex data is summarized in the following figure:
Points to note: This is self-reported data and needs to be interpreted accordingly, but the
Google/Wikipedia internal control (100% use) seems valid. Students expressed a strong
preference for "trusted" brands which they recognized, such as Google and YouTube, even
though these are not normally considered to be academic channels. Nearly all the mind
maps show a complex mixture of personal and professional services. This seems to have
changed over the last 2-3 years, when students liked to compartmentalized the personal
and university identities. Online identities are merging. Institutional services feature low
on this list - is this accurate of just perception of what is required? At this time, is the
Institution becoming transparent? This is confirmed by other recent research
(http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2009/06/top_100_student_websites_uk.html).

To assist in the construction of ePortfolios, students were give exemplars based on a

fictional first year students "Joanna Hughes". These were hosted on the
Wetpaint/Wikispaces sites. Students were also given assessment criteria and a schedule of
four assessment deadlines. The assessment criteria were based loosely on the reported E-
Portfolio Assessment Criteria from Penn State University
(http://www.wikieducator.org/MOSEP_Module_4/session2). There modified assessment
criteria proved to be robust and reliable and will be used again next year. Many students
struggled to distinguish between a curriculum vitae and a portfolio, so the process and
value of reflection needs to be emphasised. Because eportfolios were "taught" within a
single module, there is little feed-forward, at the end of the module students move on to
the next course, a drawback of modularization.

Students tend to dislike portfolios, whatever the format. Fundamentally, it is the process
of enforced reflection they find challenging rather than the software used or the
implementation. In responses to questionnaires, students implied that they didn't enjoy
reflecting on learning because they perceive it to be "not relevant" to a science degree.
This is a common attitude which takes a long time to wear down. The context the
portfolio task is presented in is of great importance. Once the assessment ceased, the
students stopped contributing to their portfolios and only 1% of ePortfolios created on
module BS1011 were updated >1 month after end of module. 56% of the ePortfolios
 created were public - students had been made aware of the issues relating to
public/private access to their e-Portfolios.

9. Project Outcomes and Achievements

This project has already resulted in a number of conference presentations and

publications (see Dissemination). Our review of Web2.0 services is available online at:
http://pleuol.wetpaint.com. Several manuscripts for peer-reviewed journals describing
the outcomes of this work are currently in preparation.

10. Evaluation

Many different methods of data collection were used during the course of this work.
Although Blackboard was used as an authentication hub for administration and assessment
of the modules, student activity took place across a wide range of distributed services,
some of which were difficult to track. All of the services used were linked to assessed
tasks and marks were recorded via Blackboard. Formal and informal feedback was
received from students in face to face sessions, and via numerous online channels,
including Blackboard, email and Twitter.

11. Further Developments

All of the students chose to use a wiki format for our ePortfolios last year, but the native
flexibility of these sites seems to have been difficult for many. Interestingly, some of the
more "successful" examples (i.e. those which seemed to get to genuine reflective insight)
imposed a chronological format on their wiki - i.e. turned it into a blog! Consequently, we
are going to utilize the reflective blog format next year, with tagging for aggregation and
record keeping. In summary, out future plans for the continuation of this project are:
• Repeat of PLE module with slightly revised assessment schedule.
• Repeat of ePortfolio module with blog scaffolding of reflection, and tagging for
aggregation and record keeping.

12. Dissemination

AJ Cann presented the initial findings of this work at the HEA Science Learning and
Teaching Conference in Edinburgh in June 2009 and will present further findings at the
ALT-C conference in Manchester in September 2009. Jo Badge presented the findings at
the HEA conference in Manchester in July 2009.
AJ Cann and Matthew Mobbs (SDSS) have delivered workshops on this topic at Centre for
Recording Achievement (CRA) meetings, and an article describing the work has been
published in the CRA eJournal "On Reflection".
Additional manuscripts describing the PLE and ePortfolio aspects of the project are
currently in preparation for peer-reviewed journals.
AJ Cann has also blogged extensively about and discussed the findings of the project:
http://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com/search/label/PLE
http://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com/search/label/e-portfolios

13. Acknowledgements of external bodies

Additional funding for this project was awarded by the HEA Subject Centre for Biosciences
which enabled staff buy-out for delivery and assessment with this large group of students.